5 Top FAQs and Tips on Salesforce Campaigns

Salesforce Sales Cloud is a robust platform with a multitude of capabilities for managing and growing the sales function. But it can and should also be used by marketing teams for closed-loop reporting.

One native Salesforce feature we discussed that is commonly underutilized, whether you’re using a marketing automation tool or not, is the Campaigns functionality. Let’s look at some of the common questions and hurdles encountered when setting up Salesforce Campaigns.

1. Who owns a Salesforce Campaign? Sales or marketing?

Marketing creates content and sales follows up with prospects who have engaged with the content. So who owns the campaign record where all the information is collected? Common best practice is for the marketing team to create and own the Salesforce campaign.
At Nuvem, we encourage our clients to adopt a sales enablement strategy, which includes a documented process between marketing and sales for creating and managing Campaigns. Remember to include processes that can automate Campaign attribution through your marketing automation tool.

Salesforce Campaigns are the best way marketing, sales and executive leaders can review the analytics of which campaigns are producing quality leads, what’s pushing buyers to their next step in the sales process and which campaigns are helping opportunities close..

2. What are Campaign Members about?

Setting up a Campaign record in Salesforce is a great way to track the timing of a marketing effort, along with the budgeted and actual expense. However, associating that campaign with the Leads and Contacts who’ve responded adds layers of analytics and transparency into what marketing efforts are most effective.

Thankfully, with Pardot and other marketing automation systems, you can automate the process of adding Leads and Contacts to Campaigns as Campaign Members. Through Campaign Members, you can indicate who is connected to a particular Campaign, as well as which Campaign Members engaged with your brand by attending your webinar, downloading a content piece or clicking the link in your email.

Salesforce Pro Tip: when creating your Campaign, click the “Advanced Setup” button to customize the available Campaign Member statuses. We advise using the same statuses across all similar Campaign Types for consistent data when reporting.

3. How do I know which Campaigns impact my Opportunities?

Since Campaigns are standard Salesforce functionality, your org already has a number of Campaign reports built in. This article from Salesforce lists all reports that come with your org, including Campaign Influence reports.

Additionally, the Campaign record has a quick link to the Campaign Call Down report, which shows all Campaign Members associated with that particular Campaign.

Salesforce Pro Tip: create additional Campaign reports and display the charts on the Campaign record page.

Leads and Contacts will be associated to many Campaigns. At the point in your sales process when you are ready to convert a Lead to an Opportunity, be sure to indicate the Primary Campaign Source on the Opportunity record so you can track which marketing efforts are turning your Leads into Opportunities.

4. What is a Parent Campaign? How do I structure the hierarchy?

Campaigns can be set up with a hierarchy to allow layers in the resulting analytics. For example, you may have a Parent Campaign for trade shows with additionals Campaigns under for each specific trade show where you run a booth.

Trade Show

2015 Industry Trade Show

2014 Industry Trade Show

2013 Industry Trade Show

In this example, a Campaign record may have fields that capture the number of Campaign Members who’ve responded, the number of Opportunities associated with this Campaign, and the total value of Closed-Won Opportunities resulting from the 2015 Industry Trade Show. Likewise, the Trade Show parent will show the cumulative roll-up values for the 2013, 2014 and 2015 Industry Trade Shows combined.

5. How granular should I get with Salesforce Campaigns?

The more information you put into Salesforce, the more you can report on. However, there is such a thing as too much data, which can become messy, noisy or difficult to manage. So where do you draw the line on when to create a Campaign and when not to?

I recommend thinking about your desired end result. What do you want to be able to measure and report on? Do you want to be able to compare the results of one white paper versus another? If so, create a campaign for each white paper available for download. Do you want to track every page on your website? Likely not, so you can create a parent Campaign for website visitors with a child Campaign for only the actionable pages, such as your pricing page.

Salesforce Campaigns vs. Pardot Campaigns

You should also consider how your Salesforce Campaigns structure will differ from the structure of Pardot Campaigns if you’re using those to track the original source campaign. But keep in mind, these are much more like Lead Source than the robust reporting and multi-touch options of the Salesforce Campaigns tool.